Tag: food mood

What Does Food Mean to You?
Healthy Inside/Healthy Outside

What Does Food Mean to You?

Dawn Silva/InitiateWellnessLeave a comment

Food means something different for each of us. For me it means satisfaction, indulgence, self-complimentary ( I think I’m a pretty good cook), savory as in savoring the positive moments in life (because I, like many, have had too many negative moments throughout my life), gorging on second helpings because of life’s limitations. My excuse for eating more than I need sometimes is self-justified by ‘because it tastes good’ and I deserve it. Deserve it! Honestly? We don’t deserve much. We are given, blessed with, fortunate, etc. to have abundance of food; let us not gorge ourselves! The answers I gave are almost certainly a result of my past and present emotions; food becomes comfort, memorable, it’s social, it’s personal, it’s public, it pleases, it displeases, it even simply fuels our body but it’s rare that we think exactly that when we are eating; it can become self-sabotage.

We relate food to who we are, who we were and who we want to be. We use food as a tool to bury feelings, to celebrate feelings and to blame our shortcomings on. We often rate ourselves by our commitment to what we eat, how we eat, why we eat and we let food define us.

Once we can understand and accept the reasons we treat food the way we do, once we really get to the bottom of our relationship with food we can develop a new relationship with food; we can let food be our friend instead of our enemy. Food feeds our cells, it fuels our body giving us energy, balancing our moods, our blood levels, sleep, making our health the best it can be given that we eat the right foods and the proper amounts on a regular basis. As Hippocrates said many years ago, “Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food”.

The next time you feel particularly connected to a certain food in a sort of disconnected way, stop yourself, go deep inside and try to relate how the particular food makes you feel when you eat it. There’s no right nor wrong about it, it just is and that’s okay. Slowly you will be able to better control the way you relate to and treat food.

If you’re in need or in search of professional help in your eating and lifestyle habits, you are in the right place. Email me to get started on your journey to better health, better habits and heading up the road to happiness. You CAN be in control when you have the tools to help.

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Food, Mood & Lifestyle Happiness
Eat to live! Don't Live to Eat

Food, Mood & Lifestyle Happiness

Dawn Silva/InitiateWellnessLeave a comment

I don’t remember where but I once read this line, “Your relationship to food mirrors your relationship to your life” and as I pondered it, I realized that it’s a pretty accurate statement.

What does this statement actually mean? Well, I took it apart in ways that I personally had felt about the types food I was eating. It looked like this:

Food to me had been:

unsatisfying                             lacks quality                      rushed

not enough                               disconnected                     comforting

boring                                        stringent                             over-indulgent

uninspired                                too serious                          an emotional ‘safe-place’

Then I took a look at how my personal life felt at the time and it matched my connection to the food!

What does that tell me? Plain and simple, I needed to make changes.

How do you relate the foods you eat to the way you feel about them? How does the food taste, satisfy, fill the void and fuel your body? When you eat, do you feel that the particular food you ate wasn’t the one that you wanted so you forage through the kitchen for something else? When you eat, do you enjoy the taste and the full mealtime experience? Do you feel satisfied and fulfilled with your life as it is on a daily basis? Do you feel good about your routine and free time? If not, it’s time for you to make changes too.

When you live your life fully and in the moment, you make better choices overall. You feel more confident and satisfied in your daily routine and major choices as they come along. When you free yourself from being “stuck” you free yourself of feelings of being left out, missing out and trying so hard to “fit in”.

Begin to free yourself; realize your “reflection connection” and start making changes.

Want help getting started? Contact me @Dawn@initiatewellness.com Together we will get you on your path to food & lifestyle happiness.

Eat Foods that Boost Your Mood
Healthy Inside/Healthy Outside

Eat Foods that Boost Your Mood

Dawn Silva/InitiateWellnessLeave a comment

2015-03-20 16.28.32It’s so much easier to stray from your diet than to stay with your diet. While I hesitate and strongly dislike using the word diet, the way we eat no matter how healthy or how poorly is truly our diet.

The individual nutrients in the food you eat have a direct impact on your moods. When you eat fresh whole foods in a balanced way you have a better chance of keeping your mood in balance. Fast foods, frozen processed foods and simple carbohydrate foods lack necessary nutrients which can lead to mood swings. Eating healthy whole foods isn’t only for weight control, healthy eating impacts and improves the entire body.

Mood boosting foods to increase include:

  1. Get enough of the vitamin B12 through good quality, preferably organic beef, fish, poultry, beans and low-fat dairy
  2. Phytonutrients from fresh fruits and vegetables. Farmers markets and farm stands are in season, take advantage while you can
  3. Selenium – it acts as an antioxidant, keeping your blood clean from oxidative stress which gets into your cells on a daily basis; by keeping your cells as clean and clear as possible you can help protect yourself from many diseases as well as keeping your mood in balance. Lack of selenium can lead to anxiety, irritability, hostility and depression. An increase in selenium will normalize your mood, not elevate it. Some high selenium foods include lean pork, beef, poultry, tuna, oysters, crab, sardine, other fish, beans and legumes, nuts, seeds, & low-fat dairy.
  4. Omega-3 fatty acids; eat fish 2 times weekly and take a fish oil supplement. For information on the right fish oil to take read my article Fish Oil, Liquid Gold?
  5. 1000-2000 I.U. Vitamin D daily from sun, supplements and salmon, tuna, mackerel, low-fat cheese, egg yolks, fortified milk & orange juice
  6. 1 ounce dark chocolate daily – 60% cacao or higher

Foods to decrease:

  1. Fatty foods and saturated fats
  2. Processed foods- have high chemical content which interferes with proper nutrient absorption
  3. Alcohol-this ‘feel good’ drink is actually a depressant
  4. Caffeine-this gives you an energy burst that spirals into fatigue leading to mood swings

Next time you feel yourself in an ‘off’ mood that you cannot quite explain, take a moment to look at what you’ve been eating. If you’ve strayed from healthy whole foods; fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and whole grains, your moods can be in a swing.

You can find a few helpful tips on food-mood here: http://capone.mtsu.edu/studskl/food.html